1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the field of interactive multimedia applications. More particularly, the invention relates to a device and method for building specific interactive multimedia applications based on a generic core.
2. Description of Related Art
Entertainment parks, museums, exhibitions, trade shows and training systems make an increasing use of interactive multimedia applications to present multimedia contents (which can be cultural, informative, commercial, fun or a mix of them) to their audience in an original and attractive fashion. Natural interactions, using touch screens, gesture recognition, speech recognition, contextual knowledge about the user or the local environment are particularly desirable. It not only makes the contents accessible to a wide variety of users in a very natural and intuitive way, but it also contributes to the originality, attractiveness and fun of the multimedia experience. Such concerns of the edutainment sector apply to many other sectors where interaction is heavily used, with a growing users' demand to make it more natural: industry, communication and advertising, simulation, training, military, medical, spatial, etc.
A known architecture of a typical multimedia applications device 1 is shown on FIG. 1. Live data 2 from the camera 3/microphone 4 is acquired by the real-time media processing module 5 which performs background/foreground segmentation and audio processing. The processed video/audio stream is then fed into a rendering module 6, which blends it with virtual scene elements stored in a contents/media repository 9. The rendering result is then sent to video/audio output devices such as a display 7 and a speaker 8. In a system built according to this architecture, the set of possible real-time media processing is statically defined in processing module 5. Such a system is therefore difficult to adapt to a different application, having a different virtual scene with different requirements.
The ITU has established a “Multimedia Content Description Interface” under the name MPEG-7 (ref. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC29/WG11N5525). In addition to demonstrating how descriptors are beneficial to a large bunch of applications, MPEG-7 standardizes syntax for the establishment of generic descriptors, along with a description language. Yet, it does not propose any specific structure for interaction software, nor does it mention any way to manage such descriptors.